Alzheimer's Fantasy in the Key of G: A Memoir

By Kirsten Levy

An Alzheimer's tale in which unmoored thoughts become their own voyages into the past and future, revealing a story.

Alzheimer's Fantasy in the Key of G is the tale of Fran, the author's mother, who used Alzheimer's Disease for her best and final voyage as she declined into dementia. Told in a very different way from the traditional health memoir with multiple points of view-the author's, her mother's, hers imagining hers, and the narrator's-all intertwined, all necessary for non-verbal Fran could not tell it herself. . . . A creative, narrative tale where fantasy and personal witness speak up for the patient.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TouchPoint Press
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 1956851240

Book preview

Prologue

Human memory is as vast as space is infinite. Space expands, slowly and fast, accommodating memory; the paradox of Alzheimer’s is lost memory is our most lucid, infinite, and transformative.

Nice words, dear Readers. But memory, while lucid, is unreliable. It is fuzzy and things you think you see clearly you confuse with others. This is a journal. I wrote it at a very bad time when my mother was declining into dementia. I wanted to give her a voice, to tell her story, she who had become non-verbal. Because she couldn’t, I tell it on her behalf, as she might have imagined it. I figured that she lost everything except the ability to soar inside herself, she could travel unbounded to a world not boarded by time, and my journal could record that transport. But it is me imagining her imagining it.

I worked with incomplete information. I relied on family genealogical research I got from a cousin (thanks for that!). There were conflicting dates and places. I did research about Irish emigration to America and Civil War experiences. I made a composite of my notes and memories of her family’s growing up in Somerville, her marriage, and my youth. I used expressions and dialog that I grew up with. Many of the events I cannot prove, but they are historically accurate for the time period. Of the conversation, it is things I heard her say, or imagined her saying in the irreverent style she said them or would have said absent her dementia. I took liberties and created situations and invented names and activities all in the service of a plausible tale. Some events she couldn’t have known about; it’s all included because they serve the purpose of a soaring, searching yet ailing mind. Of the relations with my siblings, I have notes and emails and conversations that are exact but may not be verbatim and may be an email instead of a phone call or vice versa. The journal collects all of it. What’s a journal, after all? It is a record; it is not the record.

What’s in a journal? The relationships. Where the people came from. The record of the voyages and the bearing witness to them. The journal did not bounce about. It did not answer any questions but gave the clue about the life cycle, the getting from one place to another, the escapism, and the transport, in time, and maybe that’s inner to journals and the relationships among them. The voyage is the thing. It’s sublime, that I own these journals, this one I wrote, and all the others embedded within that led to it, but what lies further down, underneath, is the being set free to voice a story. Perhaps the journal really is an Alzheimer’s fantasy but not in the sense of untruth.

I did find Thomas, once I looked for him. According to ship manifests of the Massachusetts Archives Passenger Manifest Search (1848 - 1891) there were two Griffin brothers, Michael and Thomas, who arrived on the Daniel Webster in 1853 as teenagers; their given ages on the manifest are a close match to their dates of birth in the family genealogy, Michael’s an exact match while Thomas’ was within two years. One can imagine that Thomas lied about his age to appear older; one can also imagine that the birth records are inexact. Griffin is the 79th most common Irish name. If these are coincidences, they are rather big. Michael, the elder, died of consumption (tuberculosis) within a year of arrival, that’s in the genealogy. People whom I don’t know, historians, bloggers, record-keepers all, did take pen in hand to record the facts of the younger, one Thomas Griffin—military service, occupation, hospitalizations—as I have in my own scrapheap of facts. Think of it, there is a record left by real people to add to this imagined patchwork of my mother’s addled thoughts. I made use of all of it and added some.

Readers, does one write a journal to make sense of the confusion, to interpret how the people meshed with the facts? Whose journal is it, yours or mine? Or hers? In a way it gives shape to the confusion, to the swirling, primordial morass, to the call for entropy. Writing the journal opened up the ways and the questions. Often our voices are not heard, it’s one of life’s hard lessons. I would hate the words to be no more than an approximation of what my mother experienced, my crude distillation of the means by which I made the journal make her re-become verbal, a base caricature of the truth rendering it somehow less than it is. Is this her story? Is it her voice? Is it a real connection?

Sarasota Hospital, Second Visit

We got out of the cab and entered the rehabilitation wing of Sarasota Memorial Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Sarasota, Florida late one morning. It was summertime, hot and sticky, July 2010. I had flown to Sarasota to check on my mother—visit #2 to the hospital since her arrival there six months earlier. My thoughts were going a mile a minute and every which way up and down. I was by turns excited, worried, and desperate but there was one thing clear: we had made it to the Sunshine State. Ok, so far so good. One step at a time. Deep breaths.

An hour earlier I had met up with my sister Deidre, at Baggage Claim. We exited the terminal into a typical tropical hazy glare, looking for the ride pool. After many restless days and nights of planning, the reason why we were here engulfed us like Florida humidity. Two things, I said, laying it out for her. First, we found Mom. It took a while but what a relief. And, I continued, flagging down our Uber and getting into it, Now we make the best of it.

Deidre had agreed, Yes, we might yet salvage the visit.

The few minutes of the drive to the hospital passed in silence, each of us occupied in thought, contemplating what we were about. It was supposed to be the end of the unknown, the end of months of not knowing where our mother had got to, but neither Deidre nor I were sure what would happen next.

Well. Here we are. Nervously I broke the silence. Flight ok?

Fine, fine. Glad you already arranged for ground transportation ’cuz it sucks to land alone and figure that out, Deidre said. She seemed to be her usual pragmatic self, dressed in her customary shorts and T-shirt. I was heartened by the sight of it.

Now, nearing the nurses’ desk, I checked in with her again. Remember, hopes not up too high.

And again, Deidre was supportive, in agreement, All things considered, maybe this is a new start and things are looking up. A three, maybe, on a scale of one to ten? We’ll take it, she chatted, making conversation. With her trademark optimism she finished, Imagine it a happy reunion and it will make it so.

We passed by the clients’ lounge on the way to Mom’s room. My eyes lit upon the residents already parked there. Their manicures were too-freshly polished, wheelchairs too-scrupulously lined up. I smelled that faint scent of urine. My heart, already somersaulting, seesawed at that instant to rock bottom and took all my mood and thoughts and positivity down with it.

I cleared my thoughts and balanced my shoulders. I tried to move my body out of this downer mood and get myself in check. Again. I had my sister to think of, after all, and we were there not only for the visit but to present a united front. The too-pink wallpaper helped, ironically. It gave the hospital an air of artificial yet imposing stability. What better place could she be in? Rock bottom in a hospital is a momentary thing, I told myself. Plus, for us, we could shake off the creeps easier here than in the rush and uncertainty and, loneliness—let’s say it outright—of long-distance travel: the haste, the last-minute arrangements, and the 6 am departures to unknown possibly hostile territory, our thoughts left entirely alone but not at a place conducive to peaceable thinking. So, knocking on the door to Mom’s room and feeling like a nervous guest, I said a prayer of thanksgiving for the hospital, caught Deidre’s eye, shouldered my luggage, and pushed ahead into a small dementia-wing style room. Sarasota was—for sure—a whole hell of a lot better than that day of the phone call or that other day of the other phone call, no two ways about it. It was a year and a half ago but it seemed like forever.

Readers, as I recall the mental activity of this day, I remember mostly the physicality of all of it. That gut feeling at ‘contemplating what we were doing’ and at ‘getting myself back in check’ and at ‘rock bottom’ was like a giant mood swing body-ripping me from high to low and staying low. Fingernails, throat, and shoulders—bitten, swallowed and hunched. I glanced at my sister whose short, solid body was a comforting presence and wondered, despite her positivity, were her nerves shot, like mine? I imagined that we both feared the time that had elapsed and all that had happened.

Mom had been living at an assisted-living facility, Horizon Bay Sarasota, for about nine months when she had an episode of congestive heart failure that brought her to Sarasota Memorial by ambulance, to the acute-care wing. When she was stable and ready to go home, Discharge Planning said she could not go back to Horizon Bay. She required placement in a facility that could manage more of her daily needs than could be managed in assisted living. So, the rehab wing of Sarasota Memorial stepped in to manage her care and that’s how she came to be here.

They said she was aggressive and uncooperative which they termed, ‘still settling in,’—talking back to the staff, refusing to eat, and in a state of generalized orneriness that I knew well. I laughed to myself. Little do they know, I thought, and from the past called up my mother in full battle mode taking on Saturday chores with vacuum, polish, and rags, safety pins stuck randomly into the seams of her house dress. Her hair, if it was tied up in a bandana and her mouth, if it was set with game face on, were signs of real trouble. Now, that’s aggressive, I thought, not this banal ‘settling in’ stuff.

The room was abuzz with activity: nurses and aides making the rounds. I was accustomed to the talk that I heard around me. It sounded very familiar. The morning was advancing, and the staff was getting the day started in the same way here, in Florida, as they had at Sakonnet Bay in Tiverton, Rhode Island, the Discharge Planners of Florida as zealous as the ones I had encountered in Rhode Island. Too many people, too much of everything the same thing, too much to think about. Too-this, too-that, including the decor. I couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling of being unsure of myself and of things in general.

Struggling up from sleep my mother, Fran, tried to swim toward the light from the depths of her bedroom.

Readers, thinking back to those days (10 years ago!!) I’ve the idea to call my mother by her name, Fran, when I am imagining what is going on in her head or synthesizing my records and notes. This seems to be good for guidance and also, it’s a way to create some space between us, she and me, while I digest the events to write about them, and between you and me, as you read about them. I’ll use ‘Mom’ or ‘my mother’ when I am in the room with her or am directly involved in her presence.

I looked at my mother’s face. I examined it for signs of change. It was contorted and dripping with sleep. Her features in repose—aged, mottled skin like crepe paper draped over her bony shoulders, translucent cheekbones, and a sunken jaw the result of forgetting her dentures—had declined further since my first visit and as before, my vision of her of thirty years prior, the spunky lady, the hellion, in good health and at least 40lbs heavier, popped up in stark contrast to the body in the bed. Back then she was of high cheekbones, fair flushed skin, eyes periwinkle blue and a nose that she always labelled aristocratic. The jawline was graceful; it used to curve the skin over her mouth just so, sculpting it, leaving but the merest trace of the overlap of the two front top teeth. Now the jawline skin was slack, entirely incapable of hiding the overlap, and the teeth stuck out against the rest giving her profile something of a buck teeth effect. Now it was the only noticeable feature on the face of the inert supine body in the bed in the nondescript pink room.

That overlap and the sculpted jawline that hid it was a point of pride in the family. It was a characteristic of all of our women, my mother, her mother, my sister, and me, and we all tried to highlight the jawline in order to hide the overlap for vanity’s sake. I thought to myself, was the face before me serving as a lesson for when it comes my turn?

Then she spoke.

Getting harder every day, she mumbled. Sleep’s grasp was powerful, it tugged her back and rooted her to the spot. Fran had the feeling that as 8 am ticked on the clock then 10 am rushed by. Is time a flow or a moment, she wondered. Are you in it or out of it? If it was flowing then you could be everywhere and nowhere at once, which she found funny, then let the thought slip. It was calming to be under the influence of the room. She drew comfort thinking that in this fight she resembled most old folks struggling to re-emerge from sleep, to get out of the flow and back into the moment, some like her thinking maybe it’s best just to stay asleep.

What I saw on her face, however, was a battle raging. Her wrinkles seemed alive. They flowed across her face, furrowing her brows like arrows that were aimed at her temples while at the corners of her mouth, they fired missiles upon her jowls. I imagined an interior struggle to be going on with equal intensity inside her mind.

Distant memories from the near and the far tugged at Fran and locked her in confrontation. They cascaded by willy-nilly, in bewildering order and at great speed. She barely got her hold on one. She couldn’t quite seize it fully. She wondered why the flow appeared to contain so much more information than the accumulated wisdom of her 83 years on earth. This confused her.

Events, happenings, illness, child rearing, art school, divorce, dementia, parents, youth, the Great Depression, all appeared in no order. Shifting conversations, no more than whispers of aunts and uncles whom she hardly knew, great grandparents, a WWI great uncle in profile pointing a pistol at someone off-camera. Here is that first of many red woolen winter coats, here is the Nefertiti green-and-black turban and yellow cocktail dress (vintage 50s), a sepia-colored photo of a crew of shirtless Yanks smoking beside a tank in a jungle somewhere, and young women (friends!) spilling out of a car. Back and back and back. Growing up poor in Medford conflated with growing up poor in Ireland, bits and pieces of thoughts grafted onto the blank slate of an early childhood landscape that once had a certain order and significance; now, perhaps it did not. And her loves, were they memories, genes, or instinct? Back and back and back and back. A voice said, At least here in America, we weren’t hungry. Another voice said, In Ireland . . . too little work for too little pay for no food at all to feed the many. A third, The workhouse and the poorhouse. Yet another, Rent too high. Eviction. And the rebel cousin, The landlord, his agent, and the damned Brits. The curse of the Irish be upon them. She found herself taking on these voices of the past, completely unconscious of it, not understanding where they came from, while voices outside the bedroom, in the Sarasota present, beckoned. Like that nice blonde young lady, is she waiting for me? She looks like someone I ought to know.

Fran’s thoughts continued streaking across her mind. A long-forgotten lesson from parochial school science pricked at her. She remembered the nuns, her teachers, and their efforts to explain the new science of genes, the bits and pieces of heredity. It was intriguing but a little over her head—it wasn’t as if regular folk of the forties or fifties really understood how genes happened anyway. Yet these bits and pieces of visions passing by, at once related to her and unrelated: it pleased her to wonder if there was something genetic about them; they seemed to behave like the flow of heredity such as she had understood it in school. Did they cascade from a random reassortment of molecules of memory-laden DNA within her, passed down the generations? Again, the thought of the passage of time as a flow popped up, and it pleased her to think of generations flowing with herself part of the flow.

It did not, however, please her to think that her life was in those nonsensical random bits, unmoored from their foundation. It was her most persistent fear, the most appalling and the most abhorrent, that what she was born with, those infernal genes, were masquerading as her memory, unsubstantiated facts masquerading as her story, her truth. That they were powerful biological remnants that her Alzheimer’s brain circuitry had addled so profoundly that they conjured up the visions in a cruel trick to simulate her lived life, spread it before her to examine, then break it away from her. Break her connection to it entirely. Destroy the meaning of it. Here and there cascaded the pieces, they were transubstantiated images of something, or of nothing. More questions were posed than answers, it was all such a muddle. Where are my true memories, my lifetime of experience? What am I seeing that is mine that I acquired by honest living? Or is what I am seeing something not really mine that came to me from the gene pool. Whatever was before her, conscious thought or disease process, she was finding herself transported in the bitstream back, back, and back, through the stages of her life and her past lives, a life that she had lived forward but that something was conspiring now to devolve in reverse, unsettlingly. If these visions were family strands of DNA, she found them altogether too dangerous; binding her they deceived her, and she was very unsettled.

Fran, wordless, gazed upon the face of the nice blonde lady. . . .

(Readers, it was me)

. . . here in the present, here in her room, while inside her mind she was hurtling through space at the speed of light. She was using her interior self to reach out to someone or something far away and that faraway place was a different world than the one in which the woman beside her sat.

Watching her, letting her sleep, I was both desperate to wake her up and unsure how the day was going to unfold. My several currents of thought were running amok. How would it work to get her fed at meals? Would there be a big fuss? How (and when) would I be able to extricate myself from the room? These were all about me and my feelings, I knew, but another part of me worried about my mother, the patient, concerned about her treatment. What's it like for her? How can she sleep so obliviously in these strange surroundings? Maybe she welcomes it, I thought.

Hi Mom, we’re here. I broke the silence.

It was getting toward lunchtime. Vacant eyes turned toward me. Oh, is that you Deidre? she asked, using my sister’s name. Those eyes once were loving, they used to offer comfort.

My sister hovered in the background out of sight, preferring not to complicate matters by having too many people in the room.

No, it’s me, Kate. Hey, there, so how are you? You know, it’s sunny and warm. Let’s go for a walk. Deidre’s here with me. Dressed in her usual T-shirt and men’s shorts, the clothes you most bewail. You did it on purpose, right Deidre? I directed this teasing question over to my sister.

She stepped further into the room and responded, Yeah, love those T-shirts, in a good-natured way.

We’ll push you over to the bayou, maybe we’ll see that old alligator. He’s as old as you.

I checked at the nurses’ desk. Sure thing, hon. We’ve changed her diaper so she should be good to go—a walk will do you all good. You have time before lunch but don’t be late.

The staff was uniformly cheerful. They seemed to be getting on just fine with her but weren’t so forthcoming about the details. You got the same blank wall of cheerfulness whether you asked about breakfast or toileting or the weather. Now that she was hospital-bound I was trying to visit more but it was inconvenient. I had come one time before, also with my sister, our first visit in our alliance against the brothers. We had undertaken that first trip and this one to see how she was getting on in Florida, a place she had always vowed never to live in or even return to. Administration had told us that she made the staff’s days difficult. So, we were coming to check on things. Did she still have some wits about her? Was it all in good fun that she was considered a tough customer? Now for this trip I wanted to be sure that her cantankerousness was not putting her in any jeopardy. Deidre and I were ready to step in, for we who knew her well, knew how rebellious she could be, true Irish, a rebel for rebellion’s sake.

We got her into the wheelchair and steered her out of there, just a little creeped out by the room, the setting, the bayou, the Spanish moss, in that place where we never expected to be. I made small talk but soon gave up. It wasn’t as if anyone else felt like talking either, it was so not worth the effort in the heat. Alone with my thoughts, again, bringing forth all those years of visits to check up on her in Newport as she declined in health. I would do the chit-chat thing only to lapse into silence on those occasions, too. The silence seemed to suck all the air out of the bayou swamp just as it had the room. Now as then I wondered why I don’t enjoy it, why it is so hard, but was equally resolved to find a way back to some form of communication with her.

We arrived at the landing, where there was a friendly bench, and gazed upon the still waters of the bayou. No alligators. Are you sure it’s the right place? Not to the left or the right, said Deidre.

To be truthful, not sure I really believe there is one, I said.

We turned around. My mother was present in body but off in space so we cut the outing to a short promenade, just a few quick loops around the path and then back to the hospital. Every few feet she asked, Where are we? and said, I’m hungry, let’s stop, cranking her head around, unable to twist her neck; the best she could do was a one-quarter turn before giving up. The first few times I felt sorry for her and imagined her to be in pain but then it got annoying which made me annoyed at myself for being annoyed. Not too much longer, Mom, I said to her back and she relaxed into the seat and we kept on walking.

Back in the room the nurse’s voice brought me to the present. Say hon, your mother doesn’t eat much. Lunch will be served soon, and we’d love for you and your sister to stay and be with her. She might eat a little more. The nurse smiled at us. There’s always hope!

Sweetie, the nurse spoke to Mom. Time for lunch. Then afterwards we’ll do our nails, shall we?

Ok, Mom, here we are. Let’s have a bit of lunch together then back to your room you go.

Time for lunch? Mom perked up, mimicking the nurse, then deflated. Nails? That’ll be the God-damned day. Mom’s voice became her old no-nonsense tone. I sensed trouble. I wheeled her into the dining room and sat beside her, Deidre on the other side.

Fran was having none of it. No longer hungry, she played with her food. Paid attention to the other residents. Put up a running commentary, inconsequential chit-chat about this or that, low-voiced, disinterested. Then the bright red shirt of the nurse’s aide at the next table caught her eye, and she asked, loudly, Lovely color, my dear. Do I know you?

Yes, hon, of course, you know me. It’s me, Sherry-Ann, your aide! Sweetie, let’s see about lunch. How about this soup? Let’s make today a better day than yesterday, how about it? Wouldn’t you like some tomato soup? Now there’s a love, she said soothingly, in the cutesy tones of feeding an infant, and came over to Mom’s table. No answer from my mother so she began again, cajoling. Lookie here, let’s have a go at this chocolate pudding. Looks yummy.

No, not hungry. Don’t talk to me like a baby.

Her voice trailed off then she turned to me. I know that shirt, it’s mine, where did you get it?

I had been feeling like a lump on a log during the lunch conversation and jumped in to answer, This old thing? Musta been one of those times shopping in your closet, I said, trying to keep the talk going any which way.

Dear Journal, that’s one good thing about talking to people with Alzheimer’s. You don’t have to make sense from one minute to the next. No obligations to a cohesive conversation. Here’s a tip, keep the talk always in the present. It’s direct and easier to follow.

Did you know that I flew here this morning from Boston? I paused for effect. To visit you, I added. So, I had to dress fast and rush to the airport. And here I am.

Mom paid no attention. Where are the colors and textures? Are they gone already, she asked. Her gaze passed over me as if over an object within her broad sweep. To the television affixed to the wall she spoke, Yellow is my color, it is daring, the color of vibrancy, intensity . . . and yet . . . Turning her gaze she addressed the chair, It’s also the color of this upholstered chair and those pills they give me; everything in here is pale yellow death. Pink on the walls and a monochrome of sickly yellows; this world is near colorblind.

Mumbling and grumbling in a voice that cadenced from whisper to commentary too low to be heard, I heard my mother murmur, That’s the blouse I wore to my first-grade choral recital, they made us wear white blouses, all the same like peas in a pod, God do I hate being twins with clothes . . . Pa in the audience. . . . Couldn’t sing a note . . . so glad he came . . . That thought drowned in the flow as quickly as the others.

She seemed to be in the past.

Now, where am I . . . walking home and . . . high school. . . . Pa is slumped in the door of the grocer’s, the grocery bag at his feet. The milk bottle has broken and the milk has dribbled out of the bag. That’s him, my father, James Leo is the name. Damn you all for your smug disapproving know-it-all looks, that’s him, the whole sorry lot of him, if not drunk then surely well past seasoned. I’m going over to him, no apologies, none. Furrowing her brow and making a visible effort to focus yet more on her interior monolog she locked in on Pa, saw herself standing him up propped against her, heard herself apologizing desperately, So sorry, so sorry, I couldn’t come in time. Then the cascade locked on Pa’s father, that would be Thomas A, and then onto his Pa, that would be Thomas, the forerunner.

Fran squirmed on her chair. Her thoughts spiraled back and forth in the kaleidoscope of her visions, blurring in and out of focus. Far more attractive, this movie she was seeing, than the external world in its monochrome, a world awaiting the work of her plaques and tangles to erase the colors and signals still more. The kaleidoscope then clicked sharply. Concentrating her brow as if to make her interior monolog real she locked in on an image. Now, in focus, she had a young boy, with a family, on their way somewhere on foot . . . who? Where? A vanished world conjured up by her disease? Are these people related to me? The images in this world were flowing clearer than before. She liked that they were cleaner and sharper than what she beheld in her bedroom, where that lady who was sitting a moment ago sat. She no longer bothered herself about the mystery of genes or the inaccessibility of memory.

In the silence that followed the lunch fiasco, Sherry-Ann went on to help another client, one with a better appetite, while we took Mom back to her room. I took a break and left them for a moment. I returned to thinking about visits to Newport when my mother was still able to live alone, the lapses into silence and the annoyed blurts that followed, You don’t say much, do you, dear, which misrepresented the situation but which I couldn’t really refute. No energy to argue the matter I would keep quiet which further proved her point.

It would come time for me to ask, Shall I take you up to your bed? I’ll help you on the stairs, they’re a bit much for you. What do you say?

Before her hospitalization, her habit was to go to bed late, the result of falling asleep watching TV. I would try to coax her to bed but she would become instantly alert and refuse to go upstairs. No was her response, the same response each time. It’s way too early, she would mutter, offended. And so, the evening wore on, in silence, the two of us alternately dozing and watching TV, until I could find a convincing escape upstairs, leaving her be. She could not navigate the stairs alone.

There I usually found her the next morning, in the same spot with the TV still on, asleep on the couch where she had spent the night, the smell of urine permeating the entire downstairs. I would get her into the shower to clean her up. At the beginning of the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we had had special safety railings installed in the shower which she liked, and which made showering easier. Later, she refused the shower but I made her do it anyway, manhandling her into the tub and under the water. She was cold although the bathroom was humid and hot. She slipped and slid all over, flailing at the railings, enraged, striking at me, shrieking at me. It happened a few times. The sound of my own desperation in my ear was almost worse than her shrieking. I can’t get either out of my mind.

The whole affair was a big mess, just like this one, I reflected, tiptoeing back into the room. I overheard some mumbling and grumbling and then, out loud, with clarity and looking straight at me, she said, There is no intensity in this world. It is vanishing before my very eyes but I shall live in a world of color! Glorious technicolor! I used to live in that world of color, is it gone? There was such a ring of finality and futility in her tone that it steered me toward her thoughts.

For she was right about the uniformity. Passing through the corridors it was hard to miss. Her pink room matched the pinks of all the other rooms, while the yellow halls snaked throughout the building. I figured that it was the hospital’s management decision to dumb-down the environment using pastels as sedation. No doubt they were implementing research findings that for elderly people, repetition and uniform surroundings calm the worries and fill in the unknowns. It was the same for the hospital infrastructure, too: location and orientation of beds and equipment, uniformity of staff uniforms, white coats of the doctors; all conspired to blend together in a soup of conformity. These were my observations; I felt that somehow, they jibed with her interior narrative.

It was necessary to change the subject. Did I tell you, Mom, we’ve bought a new car. It’s for me, my first, it’s a Corolla. Brand new! I call her ‘Old Silver’ and I mean for her to be my trusty steed. Yep, a two-car family, finally . . . moving on up to the big time. I was both excited and teasing telling Mom this. Deidre, though quiet, smiled, for she knew how Mom felt about cars.

Well, my dear, cars are freedom. Transportation, you know. . . . you can go anywhere.

True enough, Mom. Indeed. I said, So you’ve always told us. And I ticked back to all the cars she had owned, listing each one of them, pleased to see her nod of assent when she remembered one. She was of the firm belief that women’s liberation meant owning a car and never taking the bus. From her ‘The Buick 5’ days, carousing with friends through the streets of Boston in Vicky’s old Buick Super ’48 . . . the days when she attended Mount Ida Jr. College on scholarship. . . . To the white convertible dubbed The Whale (make/model I’ve forgotten)—with jet age fins and after-burner tail lights, the signs of the times— which she let us and the neighbor’s kids ride completely illegally down the last few feet of the driveway. . . . To her most recent mishap with a bottle green British Triumph Spitfire ’80 that she was able to drive one time only because it broke down on its first highway outing. For that car she had harbored barely-concealed ambitions to be classy and cool, sentiments that no doubt prevented her from seeing all that was wrong with it. Down on her funds she had spent $1,200 only to have it break down twice and have to shell out more money to tow it away as junk.

You never got a single ride to a destination, not even once, in that car, I said.

True enough, she said, lapsing into silence for a time, restless in her body and restful on her face. Then she turned around to me with a wink, I don’t do buses.

I imagined her driving in one of